So, I realized that the reCAPTCHA plugin for Wordpress sucks was marking a lot of comments as spam, when it was actually working and not getting timeout errors (thanks to my egress filtering). I decided to toss it out and go with a math-based CAPTCHA for posts, so you should once again be able to post comments reliably! I’m hoping that by customizing the math CAPTCHA to use different field names/numbers, it should eliminate the same amount of spam that reCAPTCHA did.

Also worth noting: at the moment, registration isn’t going to work because I don’t have email set up. I’ll post an update to that when it’s going again. It shouldn’t matter, though, registration isn’t required to comment.

I also added an infobox on the side (–>) with information about the author of the post, since I’ve been taking turns with my buddy Matt Gardenghi lately. Now you can see who posted what.

If anything isn’t working, or you’d like some feature/widget/whatever that I don’t currently have, let me know!

Ron

Now that we know what we need to send and receive, and how it’s encoded, let’s generate the actual packet. Then, once we’re sure it’s working, we’ll convert it into an Nmap probe! In most of this section, I assume you’re running Linux, Mac, or some other operating system with a built-in compiler and useful tools (gcc, hexdump, etc). If you’re on Windows, you’ll probably just have to follow along until I generate the probe.

In Part 2: runtime analysis, we discovered some important addresses in the Energizer Trojan – specifically, the addresses that make the call to recv() data. Be sure to read that section before reading this one.

Now that we have some starting addresses, we can move on to a disassembler and look at what the code’s actually doing. Fortunately, the author made no attempt to disguise the code or pack or or anything like that, so a simple disassembler is all we need to examine the code.

A word of warning: this is the longest, most complicated section. But stick with it, by the end we’ll know exactly how the Trojan ticks!

In Part 1: setup, we infected the system with the Trojan. It should still be running on the victim machine. If you haven’t read that section, I strongly recommend you go back and read it.

Now that we’ve infected a test machine, the goal of this step is to experiment a little with the debugger and learn a little about the Energizer Trojan. This can all be discovered with a simple disassembler, but I find it more fun to take apart a live sample. All we’re going to do is add a breakpoint at the recv() function and see where it’s called from.

This step is going to require Debugging Tools for Windows. If you haven’t installed it already, install it on the victim machine.

Hey all,

As most of you know, a Trojan was recently discovered in the software for Energizer’s USB battery charger. Following its release, I wrote an Nmap probe to detect the Trojan and HDMoore wrote a Metasploit module to exploit it.

I mentioned in my last post that it was a nice sample to study and learn from. The author made absolutely no attempt to conceal its purpose, once installed, besides a weak XOR encoding for communication. Some conspiracy theorists even think this may have been legitimate management software gone wrong – and who knows, really? In any case, I offered to write a tutorial on how I wrote the Nmap probe, and had a lot of positive feedback, so here it is!

Just be sure to take this for what it is. This is not intended to show any new methods or techniques or anything like that. It’s a reverse engineering guide targeted, as much as I could, for people who’ve never opened IDA or Windbg in their lives. I’d love to hear your comments!

This is yet another guest post from our good friend Matt Gardenghi! If you enjoy this one, don’t forget to check his last one: Trusting the Browser (a ckeditor short story).

Often, I hear arguments that go like this: real hackers write code and exploits; everyone else is a script-kiddie.

That is a dumb argument from all sorts of levels.  For starters, those who make this observation are usually those who can write code.  Therefore, everyone who can’t meet their personal standards/abilities as a coder are “skiddies” who demean the profession.

I find it intriguing that everyone defines the basis for a good pentester by their own capabilities.  Clearly you think that you are good and it’s normal to think that everyone will want to be good just like you.  Consequently, they should all do as you do, right?  Wrong.  We need diversity of backgrounds, skills, and opinions.  It’s healthy not to inbreed (intellectually or otherwise).

Hey all,

I’ve been letting other projects slip these last couple weeks because I was excited about converting dnscat into shellcode (or “weaponizing dnscat”, as I enjoy saying). Even though I got into the security field with reverse engineering and writing hacks for games, I have never written more than a couple lines of x86 at a time, nor have I ever written shellcode, so this was an awesome learning experience. Most people start by writing shellcode that spawns a local shell; I decided to start with shellcode that implements a dnscat client in under 1024 bytes (for both Linux and Windows). Like I always say, go big or go home!

This is going to be a fun post that’s related to some of my password work. Some of the text may not be PG13, so parental discretion is advised.

As most of you know, I’ve been collecting password lists. In addition to normal password lists that are useful in bruteforcing, I have a (so far) lame collection of non-hacking dictionaries. Things like cities, English words, etc.

There was a time when the biggest dictionary I had, weighing in at 6.4mb, was a German wordlist. 6.4mb doesn’t sound like much, but at the time I was on a DSL connection; with about 400kbit upstream (on a good day), I could feel every download.

Yes, I’m still working on making the ultimate password list. And I don’t mean the 16gb one I made by taking pretty much every word or word-looking string on the Internet when I was a kid; that was called ultimater dictionary. No; I mean one that is streamlined, sorted, and will make Nmap the bruteforce tool of the future!

My name is Matt Gardenghi. Ron seems to think it important that this post be clearly attributed to someone else (this fact might worry me). I’m an occasional contributor here (see: Bypassing AV). I handle security at Bob Jones University and also perform pentests on the side. (So if you need someone to do work, here’s my shameless plug.) I have acquired the oddly despised CISSP and the more respectable GCFA, GPEN, and GWAPT.

I know a company that purchased some Web 2.0 services.  We’ll leave it at that, to protect the guilty.  :-p

So, one day a bored user decided that the editor used on the site was annoying.  He used GreaseMonkey to replace the editor with his preferred editor.  This was “Clue #1” that a problem existed with the Web 2.0 service.

Hey,

I don’t usually write two posts in one day, but today is a special occasion! I was reading my news feeds (well, my co-op student (ie, intern) was – I was doing paperwork), and noticed a story about a remote backdoor being included with the Energizer UsbCharger software</a>. Too funny!

Hey everybody!

As you probably know, I’ve been working hard on generating and evaluating passwords. My last post was all about Rockyou.com’s passwords; next post will (probably) be about different groups of passwords from my just updated password dictionaries page. This will be a little different, though.

Hey all,

As some of you know, I’ve been working on collecting leaked passwords/other dictionaries. I spent some time this week updating my wiki’s password page. Check it out and let me know what I’m missing, and I’ll go ahead and mirror it.

I’ve had a couple new developments in my password list, though. Besides having an entirely new layout, I’ve added some really cool data!

Hey all,

I’m really excited to announce the first release of a tool I’ve put a lot of hard work into: dnscat.

It’s being released, along with a bunch of other tools that I’ll be blogging about, as part of nbtool 0.04.

Hey all,

Just a quick note – I updated my blog template a bit. On the right, I added some new links and I added some info about myself at the top. I also added “previous” and “next” links above the posts. Hopefully these changes make it easier to get around. Let me know if I broke anything in the process!

That’s all for today! Ron

Thanks to a Google Alert on my name, I recently found Laurent Gaffié’s blog post about MS10-006 (Microsoft Technet link).

Hey all,

I often find myself explaining to people how to install a script that isn’t included in Nmap. Rather than write it over and over, this is a quick tutorial.

Greetings!

If you were at Shmoocon this past weekend, you might remember a talk on Friday, done by Justin Morehouse and Tony Flick, on VMWare Guest Stealing. If you don’t, you probably started drinking too early. :)

This is just a quick thought I had at work today – actually, I had it in November, but just got around to posting it now. Common story, but eh?

Posts in this series (I’ll add links as they’re written):

1. What does smb-psexec do?
2. Sample configurations ("sample.lua")
3. <a href=/blog/?p=404'>Default configuration ("default.lua")</a>
4. Advanced configuration ("pwdump.lua" and "backdoor.lua")